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Abstract

In Upper Sorbian, as in the other contemporary Slavic languages,
aspect is a grammatical category that characterizes the verbal system
in its entirety. With the possible exception of certain types of verbs that
are conventionally considered ‘biaspectual’,1 each verb form in the
language expresses one of two aspects—perfective or imperfective. In
most instances, verbs that share the same morphemic base and the
same lexical meaning constitute a pair of aspectually complementary
verbs; these are referred to as an ‘aspectual pair’. Thus, the Upper
Sorbian (hereafter, USo) verb cˇinic´ is an aspectually imperfective verb
signifying ‘to do’, and it is paired with the aspectually perfective verb
scˇinic´ which likewise signifies ‘to do’. The paradigms of both verbs
include two synthetically formed tenses, present (or ‘non-past’) and
preterite.2 The synthetic non-past tense forms of the imperfective verb
can denote an eventive present (sometimes designated by the Latin
terms praesens actuale or praesens hic et nunc), while those of the perfective.